The Idea of the Holy

Before religion became morality touched with emotion it was the emotion itself, or a group of emotions, and it still is. These emotions are, in the translator's summary; the feeling of the uncanny, the thrill of awe or reverence, the sense of dependence, of impotence, or of nothingness, or again, the feelings of religious rapture and exaltation. The author of the present book calls them the non-rational feelings, the sense of the tremendous, the awful, the mysterious, or, in a word of his choosing, the numinous. Both author and translator make it clear that religion must accommodate both the numinous and the ethical, The Idea of the Holy (Das Heitige), which is fundamentally an inquiry into the non-rational, is a book which has established itself, since the English translation first appeared in 1923, as a classic in the field of religious philosophy.